The Onion reveals true source of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s prowess.

  

 

This issue arrives in the midst of the return to school. Some of you are fully settled in. Others are preparing for the great return. All of you are concerned about your students’ retention from lessons in the Covidian fog as well as about the safety of school this year in the midst of the delta variation. To all of you, all of us at Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers send positive energy and good wishes for a great year!

 

Should questions arise about one of our texts, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Our classics-trained editors welcome your inquiries.

 

For those of you using, planning to use, or curious to learn more about Lumina for Caesar and Vergil Selections, mark your calendars for a webinar presented by Patrick Yaggy, the veteran teacher of AP Latin who developed this special online learning activity for the AP Latin curriculum. On Tuesday, September 14 at 7:30 pm ET [note the later time! A departure from our usual starting time] he will reprise last year’s webinar with commentary about the updates in place for the new school year.

 

The publication of our first novellas this past year has had all of us aflutter! Thus, you’ll understand what a delight it was to watch a robin nest on our back porch and then nurture her three wee ones. I predicted she would knock the fledglings from their nest in the next week and sure enough, three days later they were gone! A harbinger for the start of school?!

Speaking of novellas, do check out this issue’s interview with Professor Christopher Bungard, who discusses his novella set that will introduce novice Latin readers to the world of Roman theater. Bungard’s Explore Latin: Ludi Scaenici is due to debut this fall. You’ll love its magnificent full-color photographs drawn from Rome’s material culture.

 

In this first issue of the 2021–2022 school year, master Latin teacher and educational consultant Lynne West shares tips for establishing a routine for starting strong. She’ll also offer teaching tips in several issues this year. With the September issue, we’ll offer the first of seven short stories to accompany Latin for the New Millennium. Each story penned by Emma Vanderpool will be composed to complement LNM’s unit reviews. The stories will provide reinforcement of the grammar and syntax from each review unit’s three chapters and will employ the vocabulary of the corresponding chapters. Pretty cool!

 

May I offer a little teaching tip for the various links provided in the “Teaching Tips and Resources” section? You might consider assigning them to students to read, process, and then present a synopsis of key points and information to the class. 

 

Again, all good wishes for a terrific year from all of us at B-C!

All best,

 

Don

As we prepare to start another school year and our attention lingers on the continually growing to-do list, I want to focus on the important task of developing routines. During the first weeks, we teach many routines that help us do our work more efficiently and help students get the most from our classes. In this column, I’m going to focus on developing an opening routine for a class.

 

Take a moment to think about the students who walk into your classroom each period. Do they bring enthusiasm and energy to the classroom? Are they still pondering their previous lesson or perhaps the test they just completed? Our students walk into our classrooms at differing levels of focus, readiness, and energy. A lesson gets off to a great start when students’ minds are focused and ready to engage in the learning, when they are interested and excited about the topic, and when they have a sense of how the day’s goals fit into the broader context of the course. 

Establishing a general routine to use daily at the beginning of a lesson goes a long way toward helping students focus and get ready for the learning. Ideally, the basic structure of the routine remains the same from day to day. Here’s one example that is general enough to be useful each day and also offers flexibility. During the passing period, the teacher greets and checks in with individual students. A couple of minutes before the start of class, the teacher uses a quiet signal and directs the students’ attention to a slide displaying the instructions for a short warm-up activity. The students complete the warm-up activity individually in their notebooks. Teaching students to come into the room, check the board for the warm-up task, and get to work on it independently gives the teacher a few precious moments at the start of the period to transition to the lesson ahead and take care of administrative tasks like attendance, etc.

 

There are so many variations on what the warm-up activity can look like. I like to include a mindfulness technique as well as something content related. Here are some that can be used at any time throughout an instructional unit:

Once the class has completed the warm-up activity, it’s a great time to share with students what the day’s lesson will look like. This could mean looking at the objectives or goals and/or providing an overview of the agenda. At this point, students are more focused and better prepared to encounter the new lesson.

 

 

CB: I had done some theater stuff in high school, and I especially enjoyed comedies. Initially in my undergraduate studies at Denison University, I had not thought about doing stuff with the theater, but in my senior year, I had the good fortune to take a class on Plautus in Latin with Garret Jacobsen and Aristophanes in Greek with Timothy Hofmeister. That transferred over into graduate school at the Ohio State University, where I had a chance to take another course on Plautus with William Batstone and another on Aristophanes with Victoria Wohl, and I think that is where the seeds for my love of ancient theater really started to take hold. In my second year, William Anderson came to OSU as a visiting professor, and I enjoyed his course on Terence. As I was thinking about what to do for my dissertation, I remembered this lingering interest in Roman theater that went back to the end of my undergraduate time and the beginning of my graduate time.

 

DES: Have you performed in any plays from ancient theater?

 

CB: Thanks to the SCS (Society for Classical Studies) Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP) and the newly formed CAMWS (Classical Association of the Middle West and South) Theater in Ancient Greece and Rome (TiGR), I have enjoyed the opportunity to act in some ancient performances, and I even got to direct a production of my translation of Plautus’s Truculentus. I find that acting out ancient theater is a great way to think about these ancient plays in dynamic ways, and I have even used performance in many of my classes. Students really get into theater when they have a chance to see it, and performing it for oneself is such a deep and meaningful way to get into the head of these characters and to bring them to life.

DES: What motivated you to become an author for B-C’s Explore Latin and Encounter Latin novella series?

 

CB: I see this series as a really exciting opportunity to get young people interested in Latin language and Roman culture, and I hope that many young people reading these books will think about continuing to learn Latin well after it is “required” of them. Roman theater is such a rich cultural space for thinking about the experiences of non-elite Romans, and I find the characters of Plautus’s comedies fascinating.

 

DES: What’s your vision for your four novellas in the series?

CB: Each book will follow a family from the Aventine hill. There are three children in the family, and each book follows the perspectives of one of the children as they venture down the Aventine, passing the Circus Maximus, on their way to the Palatine and the steps of the Temple of the Magna Mater to go see a play from Plautus. As the difficulty of the books increases, we move up from the youngest boy, Titus, to his middle sister, Fulvia Minor, and then to the older sister, Fulvia Major.

 

Mom and dad also have interesting pasts as formerly enslaved people who are now freed and running a shop that makes and repairs wagon wheels. Dad was enslaved when the Romans took Tarentum in the Second Punic War, but mom was born to an enslaved Punic woman, taken during the First Punic War. I wanted the family to have a complicated story so people could come to appreciate the mixture of languages and ethnicities that would have been swirling around the city of Rome in the early second century BCE.

 

Each book will also contain some Latin directly from a play of Plautus as the kids and their parents watch the hijinks of the play itself. Plautus’s Latin is different than that of Cicero, Caesar, and Vergil that most students are exposed to early, and I want young Latin learners to have a taste for the variety of Latin out there.

 

DES: In what classes or levels do you envision the novellas being used?

CB: I have tried to write these in a way that would be appropriate for early high school or even late middle school students, but also of potential interest for college students. As such, I have tried to provide materials that can open up conversations around the realities of ancient slavery and the dynamics between men and women in ancient Roman society.

 

DES: How did you come to study the classics?

 

CB: I like to say I was tricked into it. I had to choose a language in high school, and a friend with older siblings said the Latin program was great. So I chose Latin at my public high school, and I benefitted from the fact that the Stow-Munroe Falls JCL program had a sixteen-year streak going as Ohio state champions. I got very involved in my school’s JCL program, helping to ensure that we stretched that streak out to twenty straight years, and that cemented my love of the Latin language that I continued into college thinking that I wanted to teach high school Latin. My undergraduate experience—thanks to tremendous mentors—shifted that interest to teaching at the college level, and I have been very fortunate to be able to smoothly pursue that path. It has been a tremendously rewarding undertaking.

 

DES: What do you enjoy most in pursuing your interest in Latin and things Roman?

 

CB: The Roman world is simultaneously inspiring and horrifying. They built such tremendous monuments that simply leave you gob-smacked, but they also ruthlessly strung people up on crosses and let them rot as a visual threat to those who would oppose them. I find it really interesting to try to navigate this tension as I think more and more about what role Latin and Roman culture has in informing our own futures.

 

When you get beyond the small pool of  Latin authors—from a roughly one hundred year span—that most people primarily study, Latin literature itself also continues to grow in its diversity of experiences and viewpoints. I find it interesting to think about what people like Plautus and Terence, both from lower-status backgrounds, had to say about the world in which they found themselves immersed.

 

DES: What advice would you give someone starting out as a new Latin and/or Greek teacher?

CB: Get your students reading longer passages as quickly as possible. They don’t have to be complex, but since our goal is to help students read Latin, the quicker we can get them thinking about the flow of a thought, the better. As silly as it seems, getting comfortable with those pronouns is such a useful thing as we get into longer narratives, but we teach them later, and students are generally nervous about the things they learn later.

 

If you can find a text with some Roman theater in it (Latin or English), the give and take between characters can really be helpful in reminding students that Latin was a language that real people used to talk about their lives. The more we can help students remember that, the more “alive” the language feels, which can perhaps give students a sense of why they should care about this “dead” language.

 

 

 

 

Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers is pleased to be exhibiting in-person or virtually at these conferences of the new academic year.

In-person Annual Meeting

October 14–16, 2021

Heldrich Hotel and Conference Center

New Brunswick, NJ

Representative: Donald Sprague

 

B–C will participate in the Virtual Exhibit Hall.

 

 

Lumina: Caesar and Vergil Selections offers online interactive exercises to accompany Caesar: Selections from his Commentarii de Bello Gallico and Vergil’s Aeneid: Selected Readings from Books 1, 2, 4, and 6. Hundreds of automatically-graded multiple choice questions promote close reading of all selections and provide students with immediate feedback. Copious free response questions ensure that students have the tools to thoroughly analyze Latin passages for grammar, style, and historical context. Practice exams, flashcards, and supplementary exercises allow for further review and assessment.

 

An ideal learning tool, for online or in person classes, that provides exceptional AP Exam prep!

 

To learn more, visit the Lumina: Caesar and Vergil Selections product page and watch the overview video.

Contact Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers to schedule an online demonstration.

 

Lumina for Latin for the New Millennium is an easy-to-use online interactive tool featuring a multitude of practice and review materials. With its guided activities and self-grading exercises, Lumina provides students with immediate feedback and frees up class time for translation, aural-oral work, discussion, and other student/teacher interactivity. Lumina is both student- and teacher-friendly!

 

To learn more, visit the Lumina for Latin for the New Millennium product page and watch the overview video.

 

Contact Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers to schedule an online demonstration.

 

For those intending to learn or review Latin on their own, at their own pace, Artes Latinae has long provided all the tools necessary to achieve a firm grasp of the language. Now, the self-teaching Latin course is available as a fully interactive online program, Lumina for Artes Latinae. Receive immediate feedback while progressing through the audio- and image- enhanced frames—anytime, anywhere, on an internet-enabled device. This course is a great option for college-level summer study or course scheduling conflicts.

Each level of Lumina for Artes Latinae is equal to a semester of college Latin study. Students who have finished Levels 1 and 2 are ready for reading courses.

To learn more, visit the Artes Latinae product page and watch the overview video.

 

Contact Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers to schedule an online demonstration.

 

 

Authors: Kofi Acquah-Dadzi, Gabriele G. Adeleye  
Editors: Thomas J. Sienkewicz, James T. McDonough, Jr.
 
 440 pages, hardcover, ISBN 13: 978-0-86516-422-2    $39.00   $23.00